Road warriors know the value of having a product that makes their lives easier and weighs less than competing solutions. There is little worse than having to lug around a heavy, complicated mess of peripherals that have many different cables while on a trip with your laptop. We want small, light, and functional. Kingston steps in to fulfill the flash memory reader need for road warriors. The MobileLite G2 is an update to the original »MobileLite released about a year ago. We'll see if the new design is a step forward.

Kingston's consumer packaging is white with blue accents. It seems as though many companies are moving more towards this style of packaging after Apple-style design became so prevalent in the minds of consumers.

The MobileLite G2 can come alone or as a kit with a SDHC card. The reviewed product is a kit that includes a 16GB Class 4 SDHC card as shown. If you want the reader by itself, you'll get the G2 and the USB extension cable. As usual for one of their products, Kingston puts the manual and information on the inside of the packaging.

We reviewed the original MobileLite last year and we were pretty happy with the product. The G2 really changes the design and attempts to make it less bulky (though it is still just as awkward to use). While there are no doors like the original, the G2 has a unique take on the sliding design seen commonly on flash drives on both ends of the device. This design is a very interesting way to protect the USB plug and cards that are in the reader.

The protector casing retracts to show the USB plug on one side. This is a worthwhile improvement over the standard caps that you see on many small USB devices like flash drives. These caps can get lost very easily and then you are left with an unprotected USB plug. Granted, this sliding protector doesn't stop any debris from getting into the plug, but this shouldn't be a problem with normal use.

The other side retracts to allow a card to be inserted into the unit. This end needs to be push in for a card to be inserted. Once a card is inserted, you can extend the side again to give the card protection while in use. You can also leave the card in the device while in transit and use this as a USB flash drive with a SDHC or Memory Stick Pro Duo (or higher) just like the original »MobileLite.

Since this product is intended to be used by people on the go and on laptops, an USB extension cable is given to accommodate the snug USB ports found on most laptops. Since the device is bulky, it probably won't fit in laptops that have tight USB ports; so the inclusion of this small extension cable is an acceptable remedy.

The 16GB Class 4 SDHC card was preformatted with the FAT32 filesystem and the usable space is 14.93GB. Since this reader works as USB mass storage, it will work in any modern operating system. As for the 16GB Class 4 card, it sustained a healthy 11.7MB/s on writes and a very fast 18.9MB/s on reads. This is using the MobileLite G2 itself for the testing. Most SDHC cards today exceed their specification but should work at the minimum rated speed, at least. This card is no exception and the reader had no trouble keeping up with this card. It also handled any other SD/SDHC card we put in it. It just works.

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